A Most Wicked Conspiracy by Paul Starobin

Author:Paul Starobin [STAROBIN, PAUL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

We have a sub-receiver here, who’s working out our mine

In a systematic manner which makes our hearts re-pine.

He brought a damned expensive plant, shipped in his boss’s name,

And planted it against our “kick” upon our richest claim.

He brought a gang of bosom friends, helped up here from below,

And wouldn’t give a single job to any one we know,

And when he took the riffles out and weighted his shining swag,

He wouldn’t let us see the scales or even heft the bag.

Dunham was not alone in complaining about the invasion of Topkuk by the McKenzie forces. After the initial clearance of the beach by the military, a small mining camp had cropped up there, with several dozen independent miners living in tents and profitably at work. Though not parties to any litigation, these men too were rudely halted in their labor by Cameron and McCormack, and their frustration spilled over into talk of reprisal. A former sheriff of California’s Alameda County, prospecting in the region, stayed at the camp for some days and heard angry words openly expressed. “The sentiment,” he later recalled, was there was “a clique”—a ring—“that came there for the purpose of getting hold of mining properties through the influence of the Court.… They told me that this man McKenzie and the judge up there, Judge Noyes… they were the foremost operators.” As for what might be done about the situation, there were mutterings, the ex-sheriff said, about lynching the judge.

Still, McKenzie could feel emboldened by the swift capture of the Topkuk prize, surrendered with no meaningful resistance despite the grumbling. His methods were working to make him Boss of Alaska, just as they had earlier worked to make him Boss of the Dakotas. The question was where to expand his reign next. Why not invade, say, the Kougarok district, eighty or so miles from Nome in the heart of the Seward Peninsula? The Kougarok was a range of serrated mountains, cut by streams running through valleys thousands of feet below the peaks. Ice formations, some made of frozen mud, rose from the streams up to a height of one hundred feet along the walls of the valleys, thick blankets of moss keeping the ice from thawing even as air temperatures warmed. Despite these challenges, miners based in Cape Nome rushed the Kougarok and found gold in the streams there in the summer of 1900. Lane’s Wild Goose Mining & Trading had been in the forefront of the exploration and was now planning for a long-term presence in the area. Perhaps Lane thought that the Kougarok lay beyond McKenzie’s reach. But the boss undoubtedly knew that Wild Goose had “secured many valuable claims” in the Kougarok, for the Gold Digger reported this intelligence. To read of the latest strikes from the comfort of his quarters in Nome, to have a word with a judge pledged to follow his recommendations, to dispatch his teams to the targeted site—that, for McKenzie, was the mining business: a sure thing.

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